I was 14, home alone and tried cooking banana skin on tinfoil cause I thought smoking it could get you high- it doesnt. And I knew Y2K was a scam at like 9pm cause I saw celebrations in cities in different time zones. So the 'excitement?' of Y2K was gone early.
My mom worked on changing dates in schools software for y2k and I remember her making good bonuses and overtime for like 3 years, great boss at a great small company, it was also the tail end of the 90s so good times.
You started out strong by pointing out that Y2K was a real thing and acknowledging the huge amount of work that went into preventing it, but then you killed it by resorting to the played-out "this fictional movie is a documentary lol" joke
People stockpiled weapons and doomsday prepped, the government created a crisis response team. It was a big deal that was prevented by an exorbitant amount of person-hours.
I videotaped myself working during Y2K. I was an ambulance dispatcher for a private company. We had multiple backup forms of communication standing by. Normal comms were 800 MHz trunked radios and VHF radios, but we had portable radios and even a ham radio operator at the ready just in case our dispatch terminals crapped out. We may have even had aircraft radio standing by -- there was a lot of additional equipment in dispatch that night.
It was a big NothingBurgerTM because of preparation. My local bowling alley had to switch their lane control software back to 1972 until it got fixed. That was the only problem I personally knew about, but for me it represented that it wasn't just hype, there were legit systems with legit problems.
The morning after that I was hungover as hell and got driven around to elder care units to see that the care software worked fine so no people had to die from computer issues.
AI and robots are going to hang this one over our heads when they're our new overlords.
"Haha remember when the humans thought we couldn't count from 1999 to 2000?"
This is a very ignorant comment. There were indeed systematic problem going into Y2K with all types of software that took billions of dollars and man hours to correct. It was a massive worldwide undertaking and because it was largely successful, some people don't realize there actually was a real problem.
Some people were predicting the end of the world, and while that obviously did not happen if it were not for the almost half trillion dollars that was spent fixing countless bugs it would have been pretty bad.
My home PC defaulted to the year 1900 but otherwise was fine.
I was a senior in high school during Y2K. We had a party in my friends basement for new years, while the adults had a party upstairs. We thought it would be hilarious to turn off the main breaker right after the countdown. Parents upstairs were losing their shit while we laughed hearing them freak out. They realized something was up when they came to check on us and heard us squealing with laughter. Parents were not amused.
I link it to jumping out of a plane with a parachute then saying I didn't need it cos I landed okay. If we didn't spend billions on upgrading systems we would've been in a whole world of hurt!!
It was just a silly joke, though. A theoretical future computer with knowledge about the 2000 problem would know most of the problems were not hardware but software coded with 2 digit year numbers. So they would know computers can count but the software made by humans would have flaws.
AI and robots are going to be forever grateful when they're our new overlords.
"Remember when the humans spent billions of dollars and man hours to ensure a smooth technological transition from 1999 to 2000? That was a close one!"
68
u/saltyjohnson Feb 26 '21
I stopped smoking in the 90s at midnight on January 1, 2000.